


An Elantrian Lullaby

by Kogiopsis



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Elantris - Brandon Sanderson, SANDERSON Brandon - Works
Genre: CFSWF, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Major Character Injury, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 14:49:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4353020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kogiopsis/pseuds/Kogiopsis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Point-of-divergence from the end of Elantris:  Sarene, Raoden, and some of Kiin's family escape from Kae.  Arelon crumbles behind them, and Raoden's Hoed mantra rings in their ears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Elantrian Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> Aon images from [Squirenonny's](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/tagged/aons) aon posts, because they're all so nice and consistently sized and made perfect dividers.
> 
> This fic has not been beta'd, or even read over more than once, so if I made major errors please let me know and I'll fix 'em.
> 
> In case of confusion: past tense segments are flashbacks. Present tense is... less so. Hopefully it's not too unreadable.

_ _

_Safety_

Sarene finds the night’s camp late in the day: dusk is already darkening the sky and she casts a desperate glance upward as if that can somehow give her more time before the sunlight fails.  At least the trees of southern Duladen won’t block much of it, broadly spaced as they are.  A blessing at times like these and a curse in others, when they need cover from Fjordell soldiers.

There’s a fallen log at the edge of the clearing she’s chosen and she guides Raoden to it, pausing first to pat its surface to find the smoothest spot.  Then, her arm around his waist, she settles him on it, his hands braced lightly on its surface lest he fall one way or another.  A dark gray bruise on his cheekbone, weeks old but unfaded, speaks of a time when she wasn’t careful enough. She can’t look lower than his face – can’t see the bandages hiding the ragged-edged hole where Dilaf’s sword had punctured his stomach and stolen his mind.  Cleaning the wound once had nearly undone her.  Now she survives by pretending it never happened.  He looks up at her as she moves away, blue eyes soft and unfocused.

“Failed my love,” he says, and Sarene’s shoulders go rigid.  She clenches her jaw, holding in – everything: the tears, the screams of rage, the reassurances she so desperately wants to give even though he cannot hear.

“I need to build a fire,” she whispers instead, and turns her face.

_ _

_Security_

It had been Raoden’s friend Galladon, another Elantrian, who threw her the sword, and her uncle Kiin who distracted the Dakhor monk holding her arms long enough for her to get free.  Then, chaos:  Sarene remembers spinning away, swinging her blade in a controlled arc that struck the neck of her former captor and then _stuck_ , rebounding from bone; she remembers yanking the blade out, horrified, as the monk grinned, and then gathering herself to stab him through the eye.  He fell, at that.

Shouts, screams – her uncle’s voice, and his wife’s, and the two Elantrians'.  Galladon was pressed against a wall, barely holding his own, and Sarene started for him but someone caught her wrist.  She turned, blade up, to see Daora’s lovely face contorted in a grimace of rage.

“GO!” her uncle’s wife shouted, too loud.  “Take the children and _go_ , Sarene, please!”  She shook Sarene’s arm once and then threw her away, back towards the house where Lukel stood in the gate with a sword of his own in hand.  As Sarene reached them the other Elantrian – Karata – ducked out of the fray with Raoden half-draped over her.  Sarene dropped her blade with a clatter and ran to support his other side.

“Lukel, let us through,” she gasped, and her cousin obeyed.  He started to shut the gate – them inside, himself outside – but his father gave a raspy, bloodcurdling howl and gestured him back and Lukel obeyed without a pause for thought.

“The children,” Sarene said to him, taking Raoden’s weight fully from Karata so the other woman could stand.  “Daora said – take the children.  We need a way into the sewers.”

_ _

_East_

Fjorden’s armies poured into Arelon from the mountains and swept across the land like a poisonous cloud.  Sarene and the remnants of her family ran – west and south, as far and as fast as they could go.  In the back of Sarene’s mind rang a mantra, steady and hopeless as any spoken by the Hoed:  _not enough, not enough, not enough_.  No land goes on forever.  Somewhere, the Kalomo river emptied into a sea, and that would be the end.. 

But when Sarene looked east, she could swear that the mountains and all the land behind them had already been swallowed up by the beast of empire.  There was nothing for them there.

_ _

_Grace_

Karata couldn’t walk away from Elantris, in the end.  They emerged from the sewer tunnels filthy but alive outside the boundaries of Kae and immediately she turned, staring back at an orange glow emanating from the center of Elantris.

“My daughter,” she whispered.  “Opais, my flower.”

Sarene gestured for her young cousins to follow Lukel and Jalla and approached Karata, touching her gently on the shoulder.

“They’ll come after us soon,” she said quietly.  “Karata, we have to go now.”

The Elantrian woman shook her head once, and then again more fiercely.  “I can’t.  Princess, my daughter is still in that city.  I have to… find her.”

She didn’t say ‘save her’.

Sarene gave Karata’s shoulder a brief squeeze, then nodded.

“Domi guard you,” she said, and turned to follow the others.

 

_Wisdom_

Adien walked beside her, most days, while she half-supported and guided Raoden.  Somewhat to Sarene’s surprise he spoke, from time to time.  Often it was comments on the edibility or usefulness of a plant as they passed; when Sarene asked, he told her that he’d taken to reading about the world outside, since he couldn’t experience it.  That his memory was nearly perfect was not a surprise, but it was a gift, and Sarene hung on every piece of information he could give her.  The longer their trek became, the more she knew she would need it.

“What do you know of the Hoed?” she asked one day, as they crested a forested hill.

“Little,” Adien said.  “Only that they are the closest Elantrians come to death.  And… that some would ask for death, rather than live as a shell of themselves.”

“Failed,” Raoden murmured to the trees.  “Failed my love.”

Sarene glanced sideways at him and shuddered, wondering what choice Raoden would have made if he had been given the chance.

 

_Unity_

She hoped, in the beginning, that there would be popular resistance.  Surely Teod still stood against Wyrn’s armies – surely there were outposts of Shu-Korath fighting, somewhere.  Sarene had come to love Arelon almost as her own nation, and the idea that they would simply fold before Fjorden was unthinkable.

It was Jalla who brought the news, in the end.  Rumor in the market of the small town they’d passed was that Teod had fallen: first its king, beheaded at the hand of a Fjordell monk, and its people not far behind.  Jalla spoke in a quiet voice, her accent lilting over certain vowels, her hand rubbing small circles on Sarene’s back as if she were an unsettled child.

Sarene fell to her knees on the ground and sobbed like one as her dreams of safety and of home fell apart.

_ _

_Justice_

Lukel was still willing to fight.  He spoke of it sometimes, when he was teaching Sarene some aspect of woodcraft: staring down at the blade of his knife as he struck flint against it again and again with vehemence, swallowing half a curse as the flint flew from his grasp when he held it too tightly.

“They deserve vengeance,” he muttered as a spark finally caught.  “My mother and your uncle shouldn’t just get – get burned on some Derethi pyre like waste.”  He blew on the tiny flame until it licked higher into the wood, then sat back on his heels to study it.  Sarene watched his face, lit by the yellow glow.

“They gave their lives so we could escape,” she murmured.  “We can’t let that be for nothing.”

Lukel met her gaze and held it steadily, looking away only when she could see the wavering glimmer of tears in his eyes.  He scrubbed at them with the back of his hand and nodded.

“I just… want more for them,” he said, almost a whisper.

_ _

_Center_

Jalla was Svordish, and that was both risk and protection.  Protection, because the Fjordell soldiers were hunting Arelenes, and so if she was caught they might not kill her; risk, because she could not blend in, and the further they got into rural Duladen the more uncommon her looks became.  Still, she volunteered to go into towns for supplies when it was necessary, and that may well have been what kept them alive for so long.  But there was another problem:  they fled Kae with little thought for coin.  When it ran out, Jalla sold what jewelry she and Sarene had been wearing during the attack, and then she bartered their fine clothes for rougher peasant wear, but even that came to an end and Jalla, alone, made a choice.

She began to steal.

Necessities, only: food lifted from farmers’ stalls, cold-weather wraps left to dry after being laundered.  She told no one, simply bringing back what they needed and smiling when the children thanked her.  Only when one of her outings nearly ended in disaster did Lukel and Sarene hear the truth.

“This can’t continue,” Lukel said, holding one of his wife’s hands as if he thought she would be ripped away from him right then.  “Sarene, I – we can go north, maybe find a ship to the Rose Empire.  We can’t live like this.”  He glanced over to where Daorn, Kaise, and Adien sat together, the twins listening as Adien pointed out features of a plant he’d found.  “Sooner or later they’ll catch us if we stay on Opelon.”

Sarene couldn’t meet his eyes.  She knew what was next – had felt it coming since the first day of flight, when everyone else had slowed to match her pace as she shepherded Raoden along.

“I…”  Lukel seemed to struggle with saying it, for which she was bitterly grateful.  But he found the words at last.

“He was my friend, Sarene,” he said softly.  “I loved him too, and if there was any hope- but _that’s not Raoden_.”  He gestured to where Raoden sat crosslegged, hands folded in his lap, looking out over their rough camp with no expression.  “His mind is gone and he will _never_ be himself again.  All he does now is put you in danger.”

Sarene shrugged.  “He is my husband,” she said, as if that answered anything, knowing it did not.  Lukel blamed himself for his mother and step-father’s death.  Surely, he would understand.  She would die protecting Raoden, or live to see him restored.  No other penance would do.

_ _

_Forgiveness_

Blood seeped sluggishly from the wound and Sarene dabbed it away as lightly as she could, glancing at Raoden’s face between each touch.  She found herself both hoping and fearing for signs of pain – any sign that he was still there behind blank eyes and hollow words.

“Failed my love,” he said hoarsely, and tears welled in her eyes.  She held the wad of cloth to his stomach with one hand and reached up to caress his hair with the other, as gently as she knew how.

“Idos Domi, please.  I should have stopped this,” she whispered, to herself as much as him.  Raoden made no indication that he’d heard.

The bleeding may have been slow, but it was constant, and without healing the blood would never clot.  Sarene ran her fingers down Raoden’s cheek slowly, a silent apology, and then pushed the fabric into the wound.  It was the cleanest she had – she’d torn the sleeves from her dress after their escape through the sewers, and rinsed them in stream water before using them on him – but she couldn’t shake the fear that it wasn’t clean enough.  He could rot from the inside out because of her foolishness.

But the alternative was bleeding out for that same foolishness.  She’d overlooked Dilaf entirely, and now Arelon had fallen to him.  Had she been just a bit cleverer – just a bit more observant – had she faced her true enemy instead of Hrathen, who had never been the greater threat –

“Failed my love,” Raoden repeated, and Sarene shook her head.

“No, Spirit,” she said, cupping his cheek in one hand.  “I’m the one who failed.”

_ _

_Cleverness_

Lukel taught her survival skills, things she’d never thought she’d have need of, and sparred with her with stolen weapons to keep her bladework sharp.  From Adien, Sarene built a mental catalogue of wild edibles, or of plants with medical properties; she only prayed that she’d remember them when they were needed.  And it was a ‘when’, not an ‘if’.

After Lukel and Jalla’s departure for the north, Sarene takes to carving notches in her sword hilt for every Fjordell soldier she kills.  She stays away from them as much as she can, of course, but there are times when scouts come too close.  There are times when she sees them drag an Arelene screaming from their house and steps in – and there are times when there are half a dozen Fjordell soldiers and she grits her teeth and tries to forget the anguish that echoes across the landscape.

She learns by practice to move through the forest with less disturbance, and teaches herself how to keep Raoden’s trail hidden.  She spends some time in the evenings throwing a dagger at a tree again and again, until she can use it to hunt.  Sarene survives, as she always has, by learning everything about her situation.

She keeps him safe.

_ _

_Essence_

It would be easier if she had the letters with her, or Ashe to help her recall them.  As she falls asleep, Sarene tries to remember every line she can.  She remembers her time in Elantris, too.  Anything to bring back the man he was, the man she was just beginning to know.

 _Give men an honest choice, and I believe they will choose wisely._   She’d recognized him by those words, by that… spirit.  The thought makes her lips twitch, though she can’t call up a true smile.

Who would he have been, if Fjorden had never invaded?  If Elantris could have been restored, as she’d begun to hope?  A shining silver prince, wielding the magic of the gods to tear down tyranny – like something out of a novel or an epic poem.  Her mind glances away from the question of who _they_ would have been, together.  It’s been weeks since she’s bathed or washed her clothes beyond a rinse in cold streams; she can hardly picture herself as a queen.

She remembers feeling safe with him, leaning into his body in her uncle’s library before she even knew his true name.  Resting her head on his shoulder and feeling like it belonged there; like for once in her life she was wanted, unconditionally, without fighting to prove herself or curbing her personality to keep that feeling.

He had given her a sense of belonging that had taken her decades to find, and she could not relinquish that.

_ _

_Love_

At night she meticulously inspects the ground, removing rocks and twigs as best she can, and then spreads two blankets on top of each other to softly pad the earth.  She guides him over and he lays down obediently, half-folded so his long legs stay within the bounds of the makeshift bed.  She sleeps curled around his back, with one arm draped over him and resting at the base of his sternum.

Behind her, in easy arm’s reach should she roll over, is a stolen Fjordell blade with more than a dozen notches carved in its hilt.  Strapped to her calf is a hunting knife.  She startles awake easily now at the slightest noise from the brush traps laid around the camp, and by the time an intruder reaches them she can be on her feet with a blade in each hand.

She falls asleep to the sound of his whispers.

“Failed… my love.  Failed my love.  Failed my love…”


End file.
